Harvest: reminder of reality

Oct 20, 2015 by

 

 

By Andrew Symes, Anglican Mainstream

 

I grew up on a farm. I never showed much aptitude or interest for agriculture as a child, preferring to hit a ball, strum a guitar or read a book than drive a tractor or dig a row of potatoes. But recently, much to my family’s amusement, I have been showing signs of my roots – the hidden “man of the land” is showing through as I hog the privilege of mowing the lawn, and in the pleasure I take in making a crumble with apples from our own tree, or this year, fritters from our carefully nurtured courgette plant.

 

Whether or not we have gardening tendencies, many of us will have attended, or even been involved in leading, Harvest Services in our churches over the past few weeks. Preparing these can be great fun: selecting a mixture of old and new, the familiar rousing hymns with perhaps a new song or two; what Bible passages to choose, what points to make in the talk? If it’s a family service, there’ll be a need for visual aids, perhaps some sort of group activity, and of course the collecting of donated produce for the local foodbank.

 

There are often initial doubts about how to make the Harvest theme relevant to predominantly urban audiences who have lost touch with the land. Should we spiritualize, and talk about mission and evangelism (church planting and growth; the parable of the sower, “the harvest is plentiful…”)? Or should we make the focus all about feeding the world’s hungry people? There is certainly plenty of material in the Bible and from various relief and development agencies to help with this. But each year we find that we needn’t have worried. Even if most of the people present have little consciousness of farming, a Sunday harvest celebration, with flowers, produce, tins, packs of pasta and kids’ artistic offerings just always seems to be a joyful occasion. Why is this? Could it be that it taps into something ancient, something which reinforces and celebrates the real world at its most basic, and who we are as human beings living in response to it, like a child’s baptism or a wedding?

 

Those who celebrate the end of the season for gathering in of produce, exhausted but satisfied from hard physical work from which they earn their living, are now few in our population. But many of us do some gardening; all of us eat. There is a strong unbreakable connection between us and the land. Miraculously, year after year, plants yield their edible nutrition to sustain our bodies. The complex life form of our living flesh, created by God, is sustained daily by the energy-producing fruit of plants which comes from the earth. The amazing ecosystem of seed in the ground, growth and harvest according to seasons, ensures the surviving and thriving of an even more extraordinary creation, the human being, living in community, male and female self-replicating through the generations. If as Jesus taught, we combine the physical eating of bread with the feeding on and putting into practice the word of God, while being branches on the fruitful Vine, then we are fully alive.

 

Harvest, then, reminds us not just that “all good gifts around us are sent from heaven above”, though that is true, and leads to thanksgiving and generosity. It also reminds us of the astonishing skill of the creator, which is so obvious that as Paul says in Romans 1, those who cannot or refuse to see it can only replace worship of the Creator with idolatry and ultimately a narcissistic focus on self. But also, the celebration of the harvest cycle, of our dependence on the ancient, unchanging, divinely ordained system for food, health and reproduction, reminds us especially in a context of environmental and moral breakdown, that we ignore or attempt to change at our peril the physical, biological and chemical realities which we inhabit.

 

We are not called to return to some kind of romanticized rural idyll. The Bible story begins in a garden, and ends in a heavenly city. God loves cities because that’s where most people live now, and a perfect version of ‘urban’ is where those who know him now are headed. But the danger of all earthly cities, since Babel and Sodom, is human hubris. We lose touch with what Harvest teaches about the nature of the physical world and our utter dependence on God; we elevate ourselves, we lose touch with true humanity and create in our minds what we think is a better, alternative one. The result is judgement, being “given over” to our sinful desires – resulting in a sense of entitlement instead of thanksgiving and generosity, environmental damage, alienation from one another. And, the detachment of the brave new world of our minds from the reality of our created bodies, which is part of the philosophy behind the sex and gender confusion in the West.

 

“No thanks I can create who I am and what I need my own way” would be a foolish way of responding to Harvest, just as “I’ll find my own way to God” is the wrong response to Christmas, and “I can sort out my own problems” the wrong response to Easter. God has put the systems in place so we can, with thanks, live within them.

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